The Book of Lost Friends(95)

So I call him that, too.

I work the last two wagons in the train with Gus. We started as heelers on other rigs, but four men been lost from us already on this trip—one sick, one with a broke leg, one snake bit, and one that run off in Hamilton after news of renegade Indian raids to the south and settlers murdered in terrible ways. I try not to think on it much. Instead, I drive the wagon, and watch every rock and tree, and each stretch where land meets sky. I look for things moving, and I think mile by mile about Moses.

The man was true to his word. I can’t say why, except that he ain’t what I thought he was. He ain’t the devil. He’s the man who saved us—me and Missy Lavinia, and Juneau Jane.

“Go,” he said, as the weight of his body pushed hard against mine in that alley by the bathhouse. His hand held tight over my mouth to keep me from calling out. Wouldn’t’ve helped anyhow. Not likely anybody’d hear it in that bawdy, wild town, or think much of it if they did. Hell’s Half Acre. Pete Rain was right. That name’s well earned. The gravedigger must be the busiest man in Fort Worth.

Only reason we ain’t laying under the soil there is Moses.

“Ssshhh,” he said, and looked over his shoulder down the alley, then he leaned closer to whisper. “Go while you can. Get clear of this place, out of Fort Worth.” His eyes were cool brass metal, his narrow face hardened by the lines of that long, thick mustache, his body heavy with sinew and bone and strong cords of muscle.

I shook my head, and he warned me again not to call out, and he took his hand off my mouth.

“I can’t,” I said and whispered to him of Missy and Juneau Jane and that they were the daughters of Mr. William Gossett, who had disappeared into Texas, and that us three had been split up in a bad way. “I got a job on a freight haul leaving out soon, headed for the Llano country, and then Menardville.”

“I know of it,” he answered, and sweat from under his hat drew trails down his skin.

I told him what the Irishman had said of Mr. William Gossett. “I got to get Missy and Juneau Jane somehow, and I’ll take us away south, far from here.”

A pulse beat under the sheen on his neck, and he looked around us again. There was noise nearby. Voices. “Go,” he told me. “You can’t help them from a pine box, and that’s where you’ll end up. I’ll send them along, if I can.” He turned me from the shadows toward the light and shoved me and said, “Don’t turn back.”

I ran through the streets and didn’t stop and didn’t catch a full breath till we’d rolled the freight wagons out of Fort Worth town.

We were still at our meet-up camp with the freighter line from Weatherford when a stout-built white man rode in, leading behind him Juneau Jane and Missy Lavinia on a big bay horse. He wore a cowboy’s clothes, but the horses had the tack and brands of a Federal regiment.

“From Moses,” the man said without looking at me.

“But how’d he…”

A quick shake of his head warned me I ought not ask questions, then he helped get Missy and Juneau Jane into my wagon before he went on forward to fix it with Penberthy. And that was all. Don’t know what was said, and Penberthy never made a mention of it in all the days after.

Now we’re young dogs in a pack, we three and Gus McKlatchy, who drives the wagon front of ours. We’re low in the peck, but Penberthy’s crew of drivers and wagon guards is mostly young, and more than half are colored or Indian or mixed blood. We three don’t gather much notice. We get the trail dust, and the ruts at the water crossings, and the haze of churned-up grass and chaff that hangs over the prairie like a cloud after a half dozen wagons pass. If the Kiowa or the Comanches come upon this freight train, they’ll take our wagon first, from the back. Likely we won’t live to see what happens after. Our scouts, Tonkawas and colored men who lived with the Indians and married with them, travel out beside, and before and behind on their quick, sturdy ponies. They watch for signs. Nobody wants to lose the freight.

Nobody wants to be dead, either. Gus didn’t lie about the risk of it.

At night, they tell stories in the camp. Dead by Indians is a particular bad dead. I’ve been showing Juneau Jane how to work the pistol and the carbine rifle that Penberthy give us to use. I even put the cartridges in Old Mister’s derringer, case we get desperate enough to find out if it’ll still fire. Evening after evening, Juneau Jane shows me and Gus letters and words, learns us about how they sound and how to write them, while she keeps on with The Book of Lost Friends. Gus ain’t as quick to pick it up as me, but we both try. There’s men on this train that’re missing people, men who lived as slaves in Arkansas and Louisiana and Texas and Indian Territory before the war. There’s folks in the towns we pass through, too, so we find plenty of chances to learn new words.

Time to time, some fresh names to add to the book even come to us from strangers on the road. We share talk or a camp and a meal, gather tales of Lost Friends or information about the way ahead of us, or get word of Indian troubles, or bad patches where road agents or them Marston Men look to rob and steal, or the nature of the rivers and watercourses. It’s a mail wagoner on one of our last camp nights who warns us to take care in this area. He tells of horse thieving and cattle thieving and a range war twixt the German ranchers and the Americans that went in with the Confederates during the war.